


Palette

by zzoaozz



Category: X-Men (Comicverse)
Genre: Bob Ross References, Comfort, Gen, Grief/Mourning
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-06-10
Updated: 2016-06-10
Packaged: 2018-07-14 03:58:35
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,682
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7152128
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/zzoaozz/pseuds/zzoaozz
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>What good is being strong, if I cannot even save the ones I love?</p>
            </blockquote>





	Palette

The brush dropped heavily from his fingers leaving a large splatter of Alizarin Crimson on the paper littered floor between his feet. The red was wet and dark and reminded him of blood. He drew a deep shuddering breath and picked up the brush throwing it into the jar of cleaning solution a bit harder than needed. He snatched the discolored newspaper and balled it up tossing it into the wastebasket then scrubbed the hardwood beneath. The paint came up easily enough then washed from his hands with a little thinner and water. The blood it brought to mind that had stained those same hands did not wash away so easily. It stayed, embedded deeply in both his human flesh and the living metal he became. No one could see it, no one knew it was there, the way they would see the scarlet smear of paint, no one but him because he knew that it was there and it always would be there. 

His hand shook violently as he raised it and ran it through his short dark hair. He took a deep calming breath and stepped back from the small sink. The mirror caught his reflection for a moment, a big guy that was always the first impression he gave, a very big guy, with sad brown eyes, Rosso Veneto brown, and lips permanently pulled down into a frown. He paused and studied his image, flesh and blood for the moment, pink skin instead of metallic, warm instead of cold. Doctor McCoy’s treatment seemed to be working. He was able to remain human again and change into metal when he needed to do so. That was a precious gift, one he should be more grateful for than he was. He was doing the kind doctor a disservice in moping around over what he had lost when he had gained so much. It was hard though, harder than it had ever been. He wondered if maybe it was his heart that was turned to unfeeling metal.

He turned abruptly and pulled his jacket from the rack beside the window. His flat was as spare as any dwelling could be, big bed in one corner, tiny kitchen in the other, and an single large table covered completely with paints, stretched canvasses, brushes and the accouterments of his art. An easel stood beside the table and Illyana’s face had taken shape from the blobs and strokes of color to stare at him in mute accusation from beneath her golden curls. He needed to get away from that gaze but how did you escape the eyes that stared back at you when they were in your own heart and soul. He had saved the world, all mutants anyway, and the humans vulnerable to Legacy, but for what. He was too late for his own sister. He was always too late. He had failed her, failed Kitty, failed his parents and Mikhail. The door clicked loudly behind him as it swung shut.

His footsteps were loud in the alleyway, big boots on a big man. The punks and druggies moved aside without making a sound. A few took a little longer than their companions, showing that they were not afraid of his seven feet five inches of heavy corded muscle, but then they too stepped out of his way without risking a confrontation. Prostitutes whistled and called at him but he completely ignored them. They normally embarrassed him, but he barely acknowledged them tonight, walking past with his back straight and his shoulders squared and his mind a million miles away from New York. He walked until dawn began to tinge the sky in Ultramarine Blue and Veridian and the morning birds started bickering among themselves. 

“Yanno ya got frost on ya, tin man?” a rough voice drawled from the shadows. 

He looked up from his reverie and was not overly surprised to find himself standing in front of the gated driveway leading back to the Xavier School for the Gifted, the place he had called home for so many years. A short, thick man slouched against one of the stone columns flanking the drive. A pinpoint of red, a medium cadmium red dulling out to Peryline Crimson at the edges, flared then dimmed as he drew on one of his smelly cigars. Smoking was a nasty habit, but then again, it was not as if the mutant sneaking a smoke had to worry about dying of cancer. Judging from the amount of damage he had personally seen Wolverine take and survive, he would not have wanted to risk betting that anything could kill Logan at all. He might be truly immortal when it all came right down to it. 

“Logan, comrade, the frost does not bother me. I hope that you and the others are all doing well.” 

“Fuck if I know. I stay away whenever the bitch queen is here. I only hang around when she isn’t to piss her off.” 

“Oh. Is that so? I was thinking the reason you stay is for the children, because you want to protect them. Perhaps I am mistaken.” A smile touched the corner of his lip as his friend scowled at him. 

“Ya trying to ruin my reputation?” 

“Never, my friend, it is safe with me. It is good to see you, Logan.” 

Impulsively he stuck out his hand. It was grasped in what would have been a crushing grip to a normal human. Then quite abruptly he was yanked forward into a quick embrace. 

“We missed ya, tin man. Where ya been holed up?”

He rifled his hand through his hair nervously as he stepped away from the solid and shockingly warm body. “I have been painting and trying to live a normal life. The pictures have not come so easily, though. I have been trying to find my inspiration.”

“So you’ve been moping around like a little puppy that’s been kicked too many times and don’t know what it’s done to deserve it?”

“No, well yes maybe so, although it sounds very childlike when you put it that way.” 

“Ya remind me of the kids sometimes. Ya got an innocent nature, a good heart. Ain’t nothing wrong with that. Ya coming home or just passing through.” 

He looked at the lights of the mansion just visible down the long sweep of lawn. “I don’t think I am ready for home yet.” 

“How about a beer then, I’ll buy.”

“You’ll buy?” 

“Well, let’s just say Slim’s expense account will buy” He whipped out a card with a flourish. 

“I will not ask how you happen to have that, Logan.” 

“Wise, Tinny, you may be getting smarter.” 

It was five in the morning by his watch and most places anyone would want to be caught dead in were already closed, but apparently Wolverine was intimately familiar with the other sort of places. They drank a lot, shot some pool, and talked more than Piotre had talked to anyone in months. It was well past six in the evening when they made it back to his flat. 

‘I thought my place was plain. ” 

Logan blinked as he looked around. Bare cream colored walls had one medium sized window. A plain white sheet covered the plain brown bed. The hardwood floor was neither old nor new, just there, dull and lifeless where it was not covered with spread newspapers. Even the kitchenette was utterly unremarkable, small white refrigerator, small brown and cream counters, white microwave, little two burner stove, and a single basin sink. The only color in the whole room was on the canvas and spattered on the newspapers and table in the center of the room. He had always thought that artists were supposed to live in messy, dirty, lofts with murals on the walls and fleas in the bed. 

He looked curiously at the painting. “How come the red in the trees and grass around the kid? It don’t go with the rest of the summery looking colors.”

“I do not know. The red seems to creep into everything I do. I think it is coming from inside me, not from the paints. It is too much the blood I have seen, the blood I have shed. I do not know the words to say. I try to hold it back and cover it over, but it keeps coming through.” 

“I think I know what ya mean. If ya can’t say it you should go ahead and let it out. Don’t try and fight it. Paint it.” 

“You think this?”

“Yeah, give it a shot. I ain’t no art critic or anything so it’s not like I’d have any grounds to judge ya and it would get it out of your system.” 

“I am not so sure about that.”

“Give it a shot, let me watcha. Yer practically famous now, aintcha? They gonna give you your own show on PBS? You can paint some happy little trees or some shit?”

He smiled and shook his head, “I think comrade you have me confused with Bob Ross. How sad for the world it is that he will no more make people smile with his paintings and his big Red Ochre hair.” 

He set up a fresh canvas rather nervously, no one had ever watched him paint before nor had he ever painted with the intention of releasing the negative energy inside of him. He reached blindly for a brush and loaded it from the palette he had been using earlier. Logan moved up behind him standing close enough to his elbow that he could feel his warmth, his solid presence. He gazed at the pristine white canvas then slashed the brush across it. The first stroke was red, alizarin crimson to be exact. 

He lost track of time as he painted the way he always did. He stopped abruptly when a viselike grip closed on his wrist. He blinked confused for a moment as he looked into a world of smoke and ruins, blackened bleeding bodies, burning figures that blazed like the sun, and over it all a sullen sky glared furiously. 

“Wow!” Logan pulled his hand back and removed the brush from his hand setting it down into the cleaning jar as carefully as one would set down a loaded gun. 

He shuddered and backed away from the easel bumping into Logan. He would have jumped away if thick arms had not encircled his waist holding him still. 

“It’s alright, big guy. Look at it and tell me what I’m seeing. That’s Jeanie in the sky ain’t it?”

“Yes,” his voice was barely a whisper. 

“And the kid torn apart there?”

“Illyana, my little snowflake, my sister.” 

“Kitty,” he muttered seeing the agonized face and hands reaching out in distorted agony from a crumbling and bleeding stone wall. 

“Kitty my darling, we waited so long for each other and in the end we had only such a short time together.” 

“It’s our nature, we ain’t meant for happiness.” 

Logan was still holding him, hugging him close. He turned away from the horrible painting, turned and dropped his head down on a thick shoulder. “Why do the people we love have to pay for it?”

“I don’t know darlin’, I never did know.” Logan tightened his hold on the Russian mutant catching the shift in his scent and the change in his weight as he shifted instinctively to offset the change in pressure. He watched fascinated as a blue tint spread over his skin. He stroked his back sliding his hand up under the loose t-shirt. It was cool and smooth to the touch. Pete started to pull away with a mumbled apology but he held him closer. “Nah, I gotcha, don’t worry.” 

“I will crush you.” 

“Yeah right, in yer dreams, maybe.” 

“Even your strength is not without limits, my friend.” 

“Yeah, maybe, but right now, I think ya might need to borrow some of it, and I got enough to spare.” 

“Spasibo, Logan.” He wrapped his arms around the shorter man returning the crushing grip as the sensation of skin on cloth and skin was replaced by the myriad gradations of heat and pressure on his metal shell. He grew taller as he changed but wanted to remain in the embrace and dropped down to his knees to compensate. That put him in the perfect position to rest his head on that comforting shoulder. His enormous biceps and forearms seemed to engulf his companion entirely. 

Wolverine took the transformation in stride widening his stance a little to compensate for the increased mass and inflexible metallic body of the man he was holding. It was funny enough that he would have chuckled if Pete were not hurting so bad. They were dead opposites. He was small and coarse and violent, more animal than man as opposed to the big Russian who for all his size was gentle and loving, an artist and a gentleman. He shifted a little so he could rub his back in soothing circles. 

“I gotcha tin man and I won’t break. Go ahead and let it go, darlin’. It ain’t right and it ain’t fair. We save the world and the world hates us for it. The people we love die and leave us behind and nobody cares about them or us. We got all this amazing fucking power and we can’t live a normal life ‘cause no one will let us, and we never asked for any of this. You go right ahead and feel all the things I forget to sometimes. You mourn the ones we lost and hope and pray for the ones that are left and keep on believing that someday things will be better. You believe enough for me and you both.”

“What good is this being strong, if I am not strong enough when it really matters?”

“You saved a lot of people, did a lot of good over the years and you always did your best. That’s all any one man can give. You got nothing to beat yourself up for. You never turned your back and you never walked away when you could help.” 

“Is that all there is then? You do your best and you fail or you succeed? They tell us in the fairy tales that good always wins in the end and the heroes live happily ever after.”

“Yeah, the meanest shit any mama ever did was letting her youngun grow up believing in white knights and princesses and happy endings, telling them they can be anything they want to be when they grow up. There ought to be a law against that.” 

“But it is not so dark as all that, to not let them dream. There is hope. People change, laws change. We have come so far from where we were before” Pete's voice became persuasive.

“You really think it’s worth fighting for, even after all the death and destruction? Maybe it would be better if the whole damn planet just blew up.”

“No, no! That is not right, you cannot believe that way, Logan!” He peered up into faded blue eyes, close to Cerulean Blue, but lighter almost crystalline, he had no paint to match the brilliance and hue of those eyes. “You cannot give up hope!”

“Then you’re saying it was all worth it, the sacrifice, the pain we suffer, it’s all worth doing?” 

“Yes, yes it is! Kitty knew this, and Miss Grey, the Professor, and Illyana, they all knew this.” 

“And they chose to pay the prices they paid?” 

“Yes.” He was quiet a long moment, “they chose and they would be ashamed if they knew how I was dishonoring their memories with selfish regret.” 

“Nah, they know you better than that.” 

“You are very wise, Logan. You made me think beyond my own pain.” 

“Would I do a thing like that?” Wolverine teased.

He smiled and stood up shifting back to flesh and blood. “You are a good friend, I am glad my feet brought me to your doorstep.” 

“Me too, Pete.”

**Author's Note:**

> In the comics (one continuity arch anyways), there was a significant age difference between Colossus and Kitty Pryde and because of that they waited until she was older to acknowledge their feelings toward each other. Not long after they did, the Legacy virus threatened to wipe out all humanity, mutant and non. Colossus sacrificed himself to save them all by incubating a cure in his blood. In the convoluted way of comics, he came back, only to see Kitty for a very short amount of time before Apocalypse destroyed the world and almost everyone he had ever cared about. The figures in his painting are not literal memories of how the characters died, but rather expressions of his own grief and guilt, they are not meant to be taken literally as part of any cannon. Pete was a painter in the comics and good enough to have art shows. Bob Ross painted on a PBS show and was a soothing and enriching presence in my life until he passed away. He will always be missed.


End file.
